Monday, November 23, 2015

Killing Bill , Abaaoud and Abdeslam

Terrorism consultants and military experts, interviewed
about ISIS, have not shied away from using the word “kill.” Degrade, terminate
with extreme prejudice, eliminate, contain, control and marginalize are some of
the euphemisms that have previously been employed in discussing enemies. In fact
when violence is being perpetrated against an enemy, even by those whose
behavior is totally defensible, euphemism has, up until recently, been the
favored figure of speech. Those who were rounded up after 9/11 underwent
“extraordinary rendition,” which usually meant the use of techniques like
waterboarding to gain access to information. Will the French employ their
linguistic equivalent of the term
“extraordinary rendition" if Salah Abdeslam, one of the chief suspects in the
Bataclan massacre, who is currently the subject of an international manhunt, is
captured? It’s unlikely that anyone is gong to bother to mince words, but what are the extent of the powers enjoyed by the French police
and army under the three month state of emergency that has been declared. The Napoleonic Code is not the American constitution, especially when it comes
to the presumption of innocence and it's unlikely, considering the level of
rage in France now, that cruel and unusual punishment will be too much of a
concern when it comes to captured terrorists. The French have plainly had
enough. Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and The Pity gave a good picture of how collaborators were treated after the Vichy
government had been defeated, though the punishments involving public humiliation (with collaborationist women’s heads being shaved) were quite a bit more benign than what’s likely to be dished out to suspected Jihadists. Still you do a double take when you hear an
otherwise levelheaded sounding diplomat or news commentator using the word“kill” when in a civilized democracy we usual
try, sentence and then appeal to Justice with her two scales where those who
break the social contract are concerned. Kill Bill was the title of the Quentin
Tarantino movie. Now it’s just “Kill!” and God help all of us. “The horror! The horror?” were the final words uttered by Mr. Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Earlier Kurtz also writes, “Exterminate all the brutes!"

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.